That's because there's big bucks in pandering to the Narcissistic and Borderline Personality disordered population, which may comprise as much as 1/5th of the nation's populace. People that're effectively children (pre-teen/teen) in parts of their intellectual development. They tend to have VASTLY lowered impulse control, which leads to them spending money all over the place.

IMO, chances are more likely that Apple did not "reconsider" the decision. Trent resubmitted the app to the App Store, so a completely different reviewer saw the app and probably didn't find anything wrong with it, and therefore approved it.
The approval process for the App Store thus far seems to be subjective to the individual reviewer's whims and requirements, in addition to the (very vague) standards set by Apple.
So when Trent initially submitted the app, reviewer A found the Downward Spiral reference to be potentially objectionable -- maybe his or her kids only listen to classical -- and when he submitted the second time, reviewer B saw nothing in the app that was an issue -- their kids probably listen to NIN all the time -- and approved it.

Many, many development shops which don't have the enormous global soapbox of Trent Reznor and NIN are still getting shafted explicitly and anally by Apple's backward app approval policies. They don't respond to our emails. They don't tell us why. iFlinger [iflinger.com].

I don't think of myself as an Apple fanboy, but I have bought lots of Macs over the years (starting with a Lisa 2 with MacWorks waaay back in 1984 - I'm old, too). I tend to like most of Apple's products, but the app store sucks, at least for developers.

First of all, you have to submit your app and wait an indeterminate amount of time (usually a week) for it to be approved presumably by some semi-trained monkey-boy. Then there's the whole release date fiasco that costs you sales unless you know about it.

But the worst part, is the freakin' rating system: rate-on-delete? YGTBFKM! And the ratings show up in the 'App store' app, but not in iTunes? And your competitors come along and give you the lowest rating and you have no recourse. Or the luser who didn't read the app description - it's enough to make a BOFH's head explode! I mean, my calculator app may not be great, but it's not crap. http://ghostwood.org/software/ [ghostwood.org] (sorry about the shameless self-promotion).

Anyway, I understand where Trent's coming from - which, come to think of it, is a scary thought.